Rental model sucks, b/c what you like using today can get changed to your detriment tomorrow.

Folks have seen that with all types of systems they've "owned". Like how it works now. Then company rolls in an upgrade or patch. Suddenly something works different. Or takes a different keystroke. Even the smallest of things throw your current mental model off.

When you're on a tight deadline to get shit out the door at your company, I'm sure the last thing you want is for Adobe to have rolled in some upgrade last night that changes where things are on the toolbar (a la MS Office Ribbon). And you have no say in rolling back.

edit: and as others have already said, there's no incentive to make the software better if you already have a rental user-base and no competitor. MS is trying to do that with MS Office now, b/c they've run out of tricks to prompt users to upgrade to new versions. Everyone wants to just sit back and keep earning on the "royalties" of their software user-base now that it's developed and has no where to go.

Rental model sucks, b/c what you like using today can get changed to your detriment tomorrow.

Folks have seen that with all types of systems they've "owned". Like how it works now. Then company rolls in an upgrade or patch. Suddenly something works different. Or takes a different keystroke. Even the smallest of things throw your current mental model off.

When you're on a tight deadline to get shit out the door at your company, I'm sure the last thing you want is for Adobe to have rolled in some upgrade last night that changes where things are on the toolbar (a la MS Office Ribbon). And you have no say in rolling back.

Due to the number of Adobe apps used in production environments, for instance the ads in your Sunday newspaper or virtually all major magazines, it seems likely (to me) that the CC apps will have a "no updates" option.

From my standpoint, I think the 'Rent to never own' licensing scheme should be illegal. As a Canadian looking from the outside, I wonder out loud if there is any sort of U.S movement developing where legal users who don't think Adobe is being fair are complaining to their local congressman/woman to see if this can get the attention of lawmakers to create laws that protect legal users from such abusive corporate practices.

Your faith in our system of government is touching, if a bit misplaced. Congress is usually on the side of the abusers.

From my standpoint, I think the 'Rent to never own' licensing scheme should be illegal. As a Canadian looking from the outside, I wonder out loud if there is any sort of U.S movement developing where legal users who don't think Adobe is being fair are complaining to their local congressman/woman to see if this can get the attention of lawmakers to create laws that protect legal users from such abusive corporate practices.

Your faith in our system of government is touching, if a bit misplaced. Congress is usually on the side of the abusers.

I don't know how many times I've heard on the radio or online, a pitch that starts: "For only $5.95 a month…"

If Illustrator still [had] competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

CorelDRAW is a capable alternative to Illustrator. You may not be able tweak everything to the nth degree, but it can more than handle almost all dedicated-amateur and even professional tasks you throw at it. For casual users, there's even a very reasonably priced Home/Student edition for a fraction of the cost if you don't need CMYK outputs and the like.As a battle hardened Illustrator user (victim?) I found I could do almost everything quickly and intuitively. New users would find CorelDRAW by the far the most friendly and gentle introduction into the slightly odd world of Vector-based illustration. The only obvious dealbreaker for some is it is Windows only.

I don't know how it holds up to professional demands, but I frequently see Inkscape recommended as an easy-to-use vector drawing program for beginners. It also has the benefits of being free, and working on the three major OSes.

I'm still on CS5. I'd love to take advantage of the "upgrade" at $29.95 a month, but that price is only if you pay for a year as a lump sum. Sorry Adobe, I just don't use Photoshop, much less the whole suite,enough to warrant that kind of outlay. Give me the $29.95 on month-to-month and it'll seem reasonable enough when in need with the option to take some months off when my projects are light on work the suite satiates, and make sure I can leave CS5 installed in parallel for emergencies.

For what it's worth, it's a one-year commitment, but you still pay the $29.95 monthly, not in a lump-sum. I guess their explanation hasn't improved to make this point clearer.

For myself personally, I was the sort of person who had been upgrading to pretty much every version of the suite for the last 10+ years, so the CC pricing isn't as painful to me as it is to some others. But I do recognize that isn't the case for a lot of people. I also see how the model needs improvement, particularly in the area of being able to at least still open your work once your subscription is over. The idea of being able to get short-duration licenses is also good. So while I don't personally feel the outrage others do, I can see how it may put pressure on Adobe to make improvements.

How secure is Creative Cloud? Just imagine how much images of next year's car, fashion, phone, tablet, etc models would be worth.

You know who developed it, right? So assume not at all secure. Not. At. All. Think Microsoft in the 1990s. Except it's now year 2013.

Now I am not going to defend the awful renting model but this line of reasoning should not be upvoted because it has no basis in reality. There is nothing about "creative cloud" that says you must store your files in the cloud. The applications are local installations. You can keep all your files in any local location (your own hard drive, your own file server, your own USB flash drive...).

Yes, there is a cloud file storage/sharing feature in Creative Cloud that is like their version of Dropbox. But you can use Creative Cloud without uploading a single file to it.

The cost of CC is about $600 a year (for now). That is not unreasonable for all the software you get for that, but I still wonder if this is going to erode the userbase for Photoshop and other CC software.

I do IT and web-design for a smaller manufacturing company. When my bosses come to me and tell me to trim my budget, they mean my month-to-month or year-to-year expenses. It can be easier, if the company is doing okay, for me to get approval for a one time purchase than it can to increase my periodic expenses.

This would make it almost impossible for me to get approval for CC. If it weren't for the fact that we need InDesign for some of our marketing stuff (we share the InDesign files with others), I could easily abandon Photoshop and Dreamweaver and all the rest for cheaper or open source alternatives.

I wonder how many people are going to know how to use Photoshop and such in a few years if Adobe keeps this up. I didn't get any education in Photoshop or InDesign. I got access to the software through various means, borrowed some books from the library and played around. I just learned Dreamweaver by itself. If this cloud thing keeps up, in ten years or so the only people who will know Photoshop and the rest of CC will be those who went to school for it, or got on-the-job experience from companies that can afford to rent it. They are going to be people that are expecting to get paid a lot to use this software. My company isn't going to be able to afford to hire them.

Adobe is pushing Photoshop and CC into the same realm as enterprise software, with higher costs and elite users. Smaller companies need not buy.

Seems like the Camera RAW as a filter would be easy to implement in Photoshop CS6 (or most previous versions of Photoshop) if they really wanted to do it. But of course it makes more sense to tailor it to be an obsolescence factor, as all versions of Camera RAW have done over the years.

If Illustrator still [had] competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

CorelDRAW is a capable alternative to Illustrator. You may not be able tweak everything to the nth degree, but it can more than handle almost all dedicated-amateur and even professional tasks you throw at it. For casual users, there's even a very reasonably priced Home/Student edition for a fraction of the cost if you don't need CMYK outputs and the like.As a battle hardened Illustrator user (victim?) I found I could do almost everything quickly and intuitively. New users would find CorelDRAW by the far the most friendly and gentle introduction into the slightly odd world of Vector-based illustration. The only obvious dealbreaker for some is it is Windows only.

I don't know how it holds up to professional demands, but I frequently see Inkscape recommended as an easy-to-use vector drawing program for beginners. It also has the benefits of being free, and working on the three major OSes.

The shake-reduction looks very impressive in the embedded pic, but open it up and, yeesh!, 'not cover-ready' is a bit of an understatement. Yeah, I doubt it's possible to get anything better, as that probably represents close to the maximum amount of information available in the photograph, but this is something for web pics only.

The majority of photographers using PS have third-party filters installed for sharpening (unless they like mucking around with multiple masks and the standard blur/sharpen filters), so improved capture sharpening is nice, but superfluous.

The new upressing algorithm fails miserably, IMO. The aliasing on the roof is abysmal - even a simple bicubic smoother is better, though BlowUp and Photozoom produced more impressive results. (I prefer BlowUp on this one, Photozoom is just a bit too crunchy for my taste.)

So that leaves Camera Raw as a smart filter. That is certainly very nice, but no way worth moving to the rental model. Looks like I'll be sticking with CS6 for a while.

If Illustrator still [had] competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

CorelDRAW is a capable alternative to Illustrator. You may not be able tweak everything to the nth degree, but it can more than handle almost all dedicated-amateur and even professional tasks you throw at it. For casual users, there's even a very reasonably priced Home/Student edition for a fraction of the cost if you don't need CMYK outputs and the like.As a battle hardened Illustrator user (victim?) I found I could do almost everything quickly and intuitively. New users would find CorelDRAW by the far the most friendly and gentle introduction into the slightly odd world of Vector-based illustration. The only obvious dealbreaker for some is it is Windows only.

I don't know how it holds up to professional demands, but I frequently see Inkscape recommended as an easy-to-use vector drawing program for beginners. It also has the benefits of being free, and working on the three major OSes.

The reason why everyone should drop Adobe products as fast as they can is very simple.

You are running a EOL product. CS 6 will NEVER again receive updates.

Knowing how insecure Adobe products are, this is just a risk.

There is absolutely no reason in keep using CS6 products, because you will never receive an upgrade for this again.

I feel scammed by Adobe to be honest. All those people buying owned licenses, where scammed, because they already have obsolete softwares.

Why does Adobe not keep having both options?

Let me guess, because most will not jump to their cloud model, which shows that Adobe does not care about you the customer. They just want to force everyone into what they think is best for you.

Otherwise, why not keep both options so customers can choose? Ask Adobe this.

As a side-note this is great for the software market. Allot of other options will gain traction as Adobe goes bankrupt.

No, Adobe, my work and ideas belong to me. Not to you. I will never move my work to your cloud, what ever you actually think cloud means, because your software is using my electricity and my computer resources and im supposed to pay you for that.

There is absolutely no reason in keep using CS6 products, because you will never receive an upgrade for this again.

I feel scammed by Adobe to be honest. All those people buying owned licenses, where scammed, because they already have obsolete softwares.

This isn't actually any different than it ever was. Whenever a new version of Adobe products came out, the previous versions were basically end-of-life and "obsolete". There would sometimes be minor patches for a while to fix little issues, but you were expected to upgrade to the newer product to get major updates. Disliking the new pricing model aside, the way they handle their previous releases hasn't really changed. You would have had to buy your upgrades anyway.

If Illustrator still [had] competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

CorelDRAW is a capable alternative to Illustrator. You may not be able tweak everything to the nth degree, but it can more than handle almost all dedicated-amateur and even professional tasks you throw at it. For casual users, there's even a very reasonably priced Home/Student edition for a fraction of the cost if you don't need CMYK outputs and the like.As a battle hardened Illustrator user (victim?) I found I could do almost everything quickly and intuitively. New users would find CorelDRAW by the far the most friendly and gentle introduction into the slightly odd world of Vector-based illustration. The only obvious dealbreaker for some is it is Windows only.

I don't know how it holds up to professional demands, but I frequently see Inkscape recommended as an easy-to-use vector drawing program for beginners. It also has the benefits of being free, and working on the three major OSes.

For what it's worth, it's a one-year commitment, but you still pay the $29.95 monthly, not in a lump-sum. I guess their explanation hasn't improved to make this point clearer.

Thanks for that, that's now how I read it the last time I clicked the link in one of Adobe's emails.

I realize I'm not in Adobe's usual target group, I code in a text editor so Photoshop is just a comfortable place for occasional photo work and the rest of the suite is only of occasional use. But it seems to me if they are all in on this digital future why not tempt other fringe users with pay-as-you-go (ne need). What does it cost them infrastructure-wise? Launch the app, verify current month payment or ask for it? Harder to predict revenue for sure, but more likely to attract a much larger group of casuals or lookie-loos.

For what it's worth, it's a one-year commitment, but you still pay the $29.95 monthly, not in a lump-sum. I guess their explanation hasn't improved to make this point clearer.

Thanks for that, that's now how I read it the last time I clicked the link in one of Adobe's emails.

I realize I'm not in Adobe's usual target group, I code in a text editor so Photoshop is just a comfortable place for occasional photo work and the rest of the suite is only of occasional use. But it seems to me if they are all in on this digital future why not tempt other fringe users with pay-as-you-go (ne need). What does it cost them infrastructure-wise? Launch the app, verify current month payment or ask for it? Harder to predict revenue for sure, but more likely to attract a much larger group of casuals or lookie-loos.

Actually they do offer a pay as you go plan. Not counting special offers, the full suite is $74.99/mo (no commitment) instead of the $49.99/mo (with yearly commitment).

A single application is $29.99/mo (no commitment) and $19.99/mo (with yearly commitment).

I'm wondering if the rental model is a reaction to how mature this product is. I used to work on a very old speciality drawing application, and it was hard coming up with new features for a 25 year old application. There is usually some new feature provided by the operating system to implement (like when Apple introduced QuickLook previews as a random example) but an app that old has all the basics covered and it's hard to think of things people would actually use.

I'm wondering if the rental model is a reaction to how mature this product is. I used to work on a very old speciality drawing application, and it was hard coming up with new features for a 25 year old application. There is usually some new feature provided by the operating system to implement (like when Apple introduced QuickLook previews as a random example) but an app that old has all the basics covered and it's hard to think of things people would actually use.

I think you are right. But that was also the reason for creating a suite of 15 apps that only costs 4 times more than a single app. All the hard major work was done years ago and now they are only adding a few features to any one app with each new release. Even if there are only 2-3 cravable features for a random customer, it makes sense to spend a little extra and upgrade the full suite.

In recent years I'm sure Adobe had plenty of customers who only wanted the new content aware features in Photoshop, but went ahead and upgraded the full suite. Effectively paying 2-3 times the cost of just a Photoshop upgrade, even though the old versions of Illustrator, Indesign, etc had all the features they needed.

That's the beauty of software. Once you write the app, it doesn't significantly cost any more money to make one copy than to make four million copies.

Since everybody's mentioning there favorite editors I'll mention Digital Light and Color's Picture Window Pro. If you just want to edit photographs as photographs then PWP has most features you could ever want: 48-bit color, ICC profiles, color correction from pictures of color charts, excellent curves tool, advanced sharpening tools, raw processing, and a bunch of other features that I lost track of while the version number literally doubled without me upgrading. The UI and UX is different though, darkroom like. Instead of a document model where everything is done on the current image and the undo system keeps a limited number of previous states, in PWP every whole-image operation produces a new image window with the modified data. This is actually very natural for post-processing images for use, I frequently have multiple stages of the process open at once and it's easy to go back and repeat them if I don't like my results (I'm a poor underemployed hobbyist with a film scanner with now ICE instead of a DSLR so post processing is a relatively creative process for me).

Here's how I'd categorize them:Corel PSP etc: closest to cloning PS without all the legacy stupid. jack of all trades, master design toolPWP: useful for photographers, minimally useful for any sort of desingPaint.net: actually kinda beloved by digital artists for painting as much as photos

GIMP is good enough for professional work if you take the time to learn how to use it properly. It takes three times as long to learn, but there are very few things you can't do with it. And even though you may produce work of the same quality, you won't be taken seriously by your peers. Face it, your peers can be jerks sometimes.

Last time I looked at GIMP it didn't do a number of major things that are critical for any true professional in the print/press industry. Sure it works great for web type stuff and had plenty of neat filters and tools but no 16-bit or 32-bit support, no CMYK support, no Color Management or Camera Raw support are all major issues for a lot of people. I checked the online documentation and couldn't find any indication of topics for any of these things so it seems to still be true. I think 16 bit and CMYK is supposed to come with the next major version but I don't track it closely so I could be wrong.

Photoshop been so rich in features for a while that there haven't been many huge new features in a while. Yes they always tweak and improve existing features and add new features but the biggest single improvement since CS1 IMO has just been finally being a 64-bit app. With that said the cumulative improvements between CS1 and CS6 have been pretty substantial.

The price of the subscription is NOT the issue at all,or it is the least of the issueS here.

The main problems are:

1) If you don't pay, you lose access to all your prior work.Client wants a png instead of a jpg? Better pay up.Client wants video delivered in a different format? Better pay up.With this scheme, you can't deliver anything to your clients without paying Adobe,no matter how small or trivial it is.

2) If users have to pay just to maintain access to their files,where is the incentive for Adobe to update their software with new features or fix bugs?They can fire the entire development team, not make any updates at alland still collect subscription fees. You still want to access your life's work right? (Ref. Problem 1)

These issues have nothing to do with pricing at all.Having your life's work held hostage for $5 a month is still $5 a month Too Much!

Would you allow your life's work to be held hostage by another company for a monthly ransom?That is what is at stake here.

I use Corel almost exclusively and I'm not sure what you can't do with it that you can do with Illustratro. I worked as a graphic artist by accident for many years. I worked at a college where they asked us what we wanted to use. I always wanted to use Illustrator because it was the industry standard. I asked my coworker to help me replicate images I've drawn in Corel and she said the same thing every graphic artist that I've asked "I can't." I do a lot of scientific and medical illustration but I can't believe the subject matter could be an obstacle. After all every vector drawing is basically the same thing - a bunch of shapes. I do use it from time to time but I was never able to get the kind of node control as Corel. Maybe that has changed. I haven't used Illustrator in 5 years.

I've been subscribed to CC since last august. The pricing made sense for my usage and typical upgrade path. It would be nice if they adopted a subscription model more like Maya/3ds Max, which may end up happening yet, we can hope.

Rental model sucks, b/c what you like using today can get changed to your detriment tomorrow.

Folks have seen that with all types of systems they've "owned". Like how it works now. Then company rolls in an upgrade or patch. Suddenly something works different. Or takes a different keystroke. Even the smallest of things throw your current mental model off.

When you're on a tight deadline to get shit out the door at your company, I'm sure the last thing you want is for Adobe to have rolled in some upgrade last night that changes where things are on the toolbar (a la MS Office Ribbon). And you have no say in rolling back.

Due to the number of Adobe apps used in production environments, for instance the ads in your Sunday newspaper or virtually all major magazines, it seems likely (to me) that the CC apps will have a "no updates" option.

The software does not update automatically.

And currently, you have the option to install both CS6 apps and CC apps with a cloud subscription. I take this to mean when new 'major' versions come out, you wont be compelled to upgrade to them until you are good and ready.

Fundamentally, one of my major long term concerns with a rental service model applied to software as opposed to standard sales or rent-to-own is how it changes the incentives for the developers, and the effect that has on the software in question. Developers can talk about higher goals and technical challenges and such until they're blue in the face, but at the core of the market is people responding to money. When the customer owns each version they get then in turn it follows that the developer must create a compelling reason for each upgrade. Every review will have a bottom line, recommended-or-not, every decision will get weighed, and if they drop a stinker, they don't get paid, simple as that. There are firm deadlines and clear metrics, there is the psychological pressure that comes from needing to win and needing to be hungry to win. It's immediately obvious after every upgrade whether it was well focused or not, because the market provides the most direct, basic form of feedback there is. Were the features that devs thought important the same ones customers did? It's all carrot, little stick (eventually bugs/compatibility does create a bit of upward pressure).

I don't think this is a particularly complete analysis of the economics of software rental model versus purchase and upgrade. First off, while the need to periodically put out new versions does create a pressure to come out with new features, this is not necessarily a good thing for consumers. It incentivizes the sorts of features that look good in demos and impress reviewers, which are not necessarily the features that will actually make things easier for the users over the long term. Eye candy, features that sound impressive but are complicated and seldom used, features that seem impressive the first time but quickly grow to be tedious and annoying, etc. The ultimate example is Clippy, with the great joke on consumers being that Microsoft got us to pay them to put Clippy in and pay them again to take him out. Many of the features that really benefit consumers are not the sort of things that make good demos or review bait. Think of features that smooth the user experience in small but important ways.

Second, the economic incentives with rental software are not only still there, they are a lot more direct than they are in the versioned software business. With versioned software if you introduce a dud feature or fail to keep up with the competition, you don't really feel the pain until the next version comes out. There is no immediate signal. With rental software, if your software becomes less usable or falls behind the competition, your subscription renewals are going to let you know by hitting you in the wallet right away. With subscriptions the out of pocket costs of switching (or even just checking out competing software) is much lower.

Of course, the caveat here is that customers can only jump ship from your subscription plan if there is a credible competitor to jump to. This really isn't the case with the professional Adobe applications. Of course, the lack of a credible competitor is a problem for consumers with versioned software as well.

There are probably a lot of you reading this who never actually got to look at the feature set of Photoshop CC because Adobe’s Creative Cloud licensing made it all a non-starter.

Well, I did look out of a sense of technical curiosity (though as it happens "modest" is definitely the right adjective), but yeah, CC means it's basically out of consideration. Unless Adobe alters course, CS6 will be the final version we own, but that same licensing may make "modest" upgrades the rule, not the exception, which would, in a perverse way, serve to draw the sting a bit.

Fundamentally, one of my major long term concerns with a rental service model applied to software as opposed to standard sales or rent-to-own is how it changes the incentives for the developers, and the effect that has on the software in question. Developers can talk about higher goals and technical challenges and such until they're blue in the face, but at the core of the market is people responding to money. When the customer owns each version they get then in turn it follows that the developer must create a compelling reason for each upgrade. Every review will have a bottom line, recommended-or-not, every decision will get weighed, and if they drop a stinker, they don't get paid, simple as that. There are firm deadlines and clear metrics, there is the psychological pressure that comes from needing to win and needing to be hungry to win. It's immediately obvious after every upgrade whether it was well focused or not, because the market provides the most direct, basic form of feedback there is. Were the features that devs thought important the same ones customers did? It's all carrot, little stick (eventually bugs/compatibility does create a bit of upward pressure).

Rental however removes all that feedback and the resulting pressure. Did people keep paying because they love everything you're doing, or because they're forced to or they're screwed? Rather then having to earn every new payment, payment becomes enshrined as the base assumption, only something massively negative might cause a real change in the short term. As the article says, eventually competitors of sufficient quality might develop, but for the immediate future Adobe has a strong entrenched position and has simultaneous removed the direct market response mechanism they did have. That makes them, in many ways, smell strongly of other entrenched monopolies, and we can see the stagnation that commonly results.

I'm sure many Adobe accountants and managers themselves are delighted over the thought of no longer having to work so hard at every update or make their case every single year, but merely be able to do whatever and not screw up too badly. But I wonder how it will look in another few years, because locking in customers doesn't typically seem to cause companies to become desperate to improve the quality of their offering. It's unfortunate, and in the very long term could even come bike to bite Adobe in the butt, because while shifts take a very, very long time, once they get going they have a lot of momentum. Just talking this same, exact market area, Adobe themselves did this Quark. Were it possible back then, it's very, very easy to imagine late-90s Quark jumping all over this kind of licensing scheme to add-on to the joy people experienced with QuarkXPress, and in turn making the release of InDesign that much more impactful.

Definitely some good points. However one issue I'm seeing as fairly rampant in Adobe is the massive pressure to ship on some arbitrary tight deadline with *new* features. Features that demo well, no less. That in-and-of-itself doesn't seem horrible, but the thing is this leads to:

* Poorly implemented new features (just need the demo)* Old poorly implemented features not being improved (we need *new* features!)* Bad code and hacks shipping, and then being hacked ontop of (gotta ship, we'll fix it next release)* Core under-the-hood improvements being ignored (features, demos, etc)

This is why Adobe Reader has become this horrible bloated insecure monster. For god's sake, it has an entire javascript engine built in! Same story with Flash, I bet.

Basically I'm cautiously optimistic that rolling releases will allow developpers to do a better job, and actually make the changes/improvements that are necessary, instead of just the marketable. I won't be particularly surprised if it doesn't happen, though I'd love if it did.

I have a feeling the reason for CC is much simpler than a cash grab - they realize they can't continue to produce marginal upgrades and expect people to voluntarily upgrade. I imagine they already had a 5-year plan for PS features, and just saw the writing on the wall. I for one am going to ride CS6 / LR5 for a while, and although some CC features are neat, they're just not worth it.

Also, concerning the comments about not accessing your files after subscription lapses - they would at least be physically accessible (since they don't have to be stored in the cloud). And as far as format, here's some info: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2013/05/ca ... n-cs6.html.Basically unless you're using CC features the .PSD file will be backwards compatible with older Photoshop products (including 3rd party products).

How secure is Creative Cloud? Just imagine how much images of next year's car, fashion, phone, tablet, etc models would be worth.

You know who developed it, right? So assume not at all secure. Not. At. All. Think Microsoft in the 1990s. Except it's now year 2013.

Now I am not going to defend the awful renting model but this line of reasoning should not be upvoted because it has no basis in reality. There is nothing about "creative cloud" that says you must store your files in the cloud. The applications are local installations. You can keep all your files in any local location (your own hard drive, your own file server, your own USB flash drive...).

Yes, there is a cloud file storage/sharing feature in Creative Cloud that is like their version of Dropbox. But you can use Creative Cloud without uploading a single file to it.

Is that storage on or off by default? If cloud storage is disabled, or set to disabled, then what IS going back and forth between you and their cloud? And can that data flow be hacked/tapped?

Another issue with their Cloud system is that students get the shaft (as seems to be typical with any sort of cloud or digital-only based system) just as when Apple switched to the MAS, and Microsoft to 365 (for Apple, much of their software is now cheaper as many have been split up but just no longer has any edu pricing, and Microsoft's 365 pricing isn't *too* bad outside of it being a 4-year license instead of a perpetual one).

Whatever features that are improved don't really mean much when the prices double (literally) for a perpetual license, and are several hundred more for even a year's worth of use over current prices. Unless you are only testing out the design field for a year of school or your own personal testing, then only time will tell what this does to their future user base that was all but guaranteed before the CC (beyond those currently in the industry who are forced to use it).

(For example, the old prices were $199 for the Design Standard, $599 for the Master Collection, $55 for Acrobat Pro, and so on for perpetual student licenses)

How secure is Creative Cloud? Just imagine how much images of next year's car, fashion, phone, tablet, etc models would be worth.

You know who developed it, right? So assume not at all secure. Not. At. All. Think Microsoft in the 1990s. Except it's now year 2013.

Now I am not going to defend the awful renting model but this line of reasoning should not be upvoted because it has no basis in reality. There is nothing about "creative cloud" that says you must store your files in the cloud. The applications are local installations. You can keep all your files in any local location (your own hard drive, your own file server, your own USB flash drive...).

Yes, there is a cloud file storage/sharing feature in Creative Cloud that is like their version of Dropbox. But you can use Creative Cloud without uploading a single file to it.

Is that storage on or off by default? If cloud storage is disabled, or set to disabled, then what IS going back and forth between you and their cloud? And can that data flow be hacked/tapped?

You do realize you're not running the apps from the cloud right? You download them and install them locally. They work exactly like the boxed versions, except they try and 'phone home' once a month to make sure you've paid. They will continue to function for 180 days I believe without getting verified, and then you're locked out ala a demo version.

You do not need the internet aside from the initial download and these checks to use the software.

The cloud storage is not 'on' by default, you'd have to set it up like any other cloud storage system. It's just an added 'perk' to make the subscription seem a better deal.

Here's another nasty scenario that I often see: a GIF from a company’s site is the only thing they have to use for a print logo.

I used to have this problem when I was setting up branded websites for new customers. The logo wasn't print, but it needed to be a certain size, and when you resize small web .GIF logos you get horrible fuzziness. And it was hopeless emailing the company for a high-resolution logo-- it would take weeks if not months for them to find it, assuming they even knew what it was.

What I would do was use Google Image Search for "company_name logo". I would invariably find the logo, not on the company's web site, but some cheap "yellow pages" type site. Usually the site was designed by idiots who had somehow managed to find a high-resolution logo but didn't know how to resize images, so the OMGXBOXHUEG logo was just resized by the browser instead. Right click, Save Image As, and voila, a high-res logo!

It pleased me to no end whenever this worked, because it was basically using two types of stupidity to cancel each other out!

Going to be the dissenting voice here and say I'm incredibly happy to see this move to a service model.

The whole idea of IP as property is broken form the start, there seems to be little disagreement with that on ars. Yet when we move from the idea of paying for movies and music as a service, and instead speak about high tech software as a service as opposed to owning dem bits, suddenly it's the end of the world. What? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Personally, I've either begged borrowed or stolen every version of Photoshop since 5.5, and this is the first version where the I could make the argument to myself that buying it good and proper would be the most convenient option, and minus a few bugs with the prerelease cc installer it's been fantastic. Pardon my crocodile tears at the grognards moaning about having to keep their software up to date. Looking forward to giving my money to Adobe for quite some time to come, and hoping to see this model spread to other high cost suites.